Scoop: How I Met Your Mother Bosses Open to Extending & Renaming Series After Mother Reveal

Could How I Met Your Mother live on in some form after viewers finally meet the Mother?

TVLine tossed that provocative question out to executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas at an intimate lunch the pair hosted for a handful of news outlets on Wednesday. Their response? It’s not out of the realm of possibility.

“That’s come up,” Bays said of a spinoff that would allow them to bring current Mother mystery arc to a satisfying conclusion — perhaps at the end of Season 8 — and then possibly relaunch the show with a slightly tweaked premise and title (i.e. What Happened After I Met Your Mother).

“We’ve had conversations about rewinding back to 2005 and doing a series called How I Met Your Father,” Thomas revealed with a laugh. “From the perspective of what was happening with the Mother all those years. Occasionally, she’ll stumble through McLaren’s and no one will see her.”

Bays floated another idea that similarly involved turning back the clock. “One way to go is to finish the [mother] story at the end of Season 8, and then Season 9 is, ‘Oh, by the way kids, I left some stuff out…,'” he explained. “And then it’s just 24 little stories that took place over the course of the series here and there. Like, ‘Here’s something funny that happened in 2006.'”

Given the ratings growth Mother has enjoyed in its current seventh season, it’s not difficult to understand why CBS and producer 20th Century Fox TV would want to keep the franchise going — either in its current form or an altered one. Either way, Bays hopes to have some resolution on the matter soon (the series has already been renewed through Season 8.)

“We’ve already started discussions with [20th] about letting them know we need some lead time because we do have a story we want to tell and we see how quickly or slowly we should be telling this story,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll get an answer to that in time.

“It’s a hard thing,” Bays continued. “Obviously, we don’t ever want to keep the show on longer than it needs to, just like we don’t want to end it before it should end. But it’s the best job any of us have ever had.”